Optimism infused with nostalgia:

an atmosphere of wild success built on wobbly foundations, somehow symbolized by the building we occupied:

She held herself apart, always. She never submitted,

I don’t think Tracey had any special passion for standing up, it was a point of principle.

all of this came to seem to me effectively a form of energy in itself, a force capable of creating a dilation in time, as if she really were moving at the speed of light, away from the rest of us—stranded on earth and aging faster than her—while she looked down on us and wondered why.

that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.

For just as you thought the happy ending had arrived, Tracey found some wonderful new way to destroy or divert it, so that the moment of consummation—which for both of us, I think, meant simply an audience, on their feet, cheering—never seemed to arrive.

Singing came naturally to me, but things that came naturally to females did not impress my mother, not at all.

On her face I saw that look of constant dissatisfaction, of impatience, which later I would get used to, the ebb and flow of her restlessness became the shape of my working day.